Monday, March 20, 2006

Google Video: Actually, divide that by ten

Anne Thompson of The Hollywood Reporter says that the first feature film offered for sale on Google Video, `Waterborne,' actually did one-tenth as well as originally reported. She quotes the filmmaker, Ben Rekhi:

"They told me last week that there was a glitch in their accounting," he says. "A design flaw. They said they never misled me, that they were giving me estimates that were not accurate. What had been 3,000 downloads went down to 300. It was shocking and depressing. It was one-tenth of what I thought it was."

This is pretty embarrassing for Google. A company with so many PhDs in its employ should be better at counting.

But Rekhi is still optimistic about online distribution - and I agree. He says:

"Too long the power equation has been in the other court. Distributors put your back up against the wall and own your films for 20 years. That we can empower ourselves and circumvent that distribution method is amazing. People are looking for content. I only believe that the online distribution model will get bigger and better."

4 Comments:

There's so much content available that even a limited theatrical release would give a movie a "stamp of approval" for consumers to help seperate it from all the user submitted videos on google and youtube. Videotape yourself throwing some mentos in a coke bottle and you'll get "viewers." But if you have a compelling story to tell, do you really want people watching it (as Soderbergh quipped) on their wristwatch?

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